NSDateComponents

NSDateComponents encapsulates the components of a date in an extendable, object-oriented manner. It is used to specify a date by providing the temporal components that make up a date and time: hour, minutes, seconds, day, month, year, and so on. It can also be used to specify a duration of time, for example, 5 hours and 16 minutes. An NSDateComponents object is not required to define all the component fields. When a new instance of NSDateComponents is created the date components are set to NSUndefinedDateComponent.
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Important

An NSDateComponents object is meaningless in itself; you need to know what calendar it is interpreted against, and you need to know whether the values are absolute values of the units, or quantities of the units.

An instance of NSDateComponents is not responsible for answering questions about a date beyond the information with which it was initialized. For example, if you initialize one with May 6, 2004, its weekday is NSUndefinedDateComponent, not Thursday. To get the correct day of the week, you must create a suitable instance of NSCalendar, create an NSDate object using dateFromComponents: and then use components:fromDate: to retrieve the weekday—as illustrated in the following example.